EIRE’S NAVY.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LX, Issue 156, 1 June 1940, Page 12

EIRE’S NAVY.

NEW TRADITIONS SET. In the yard of a famous British boat-builder the world’s newest navy is speedily approaching completion. It is the Eire navy. Eire officially joined the world’s maritime powers when, with due ceremony, the first Eirish naval officer and the first six Eirish able seamen stepped from a Thames dock recently to man Eire’s war vessel No. 1, a 50-knot motor torpedo boat. Eire is to have a whole fleet oi these motor torpedo boats which, carrying torpedoes and depth charges and able to dart through the seas at 50 knots, will form a useful, even formidable, coastal defence squadron. The whole navy is to cost Eire £250,000, including additional trawlers and patrol boats. Eire’s need for a navy is only two years old, for it a.rose when the British moved out of the fortified bases of Cobh, Bereliaven and Lougli Swilly in 1938, under the Anglo-Irish Agreement of that year. The decision to build the fleet of torpedo boats has been received in Eire with enthusiasm. There has been a rush of volunteers to join the new navy, and a special board has been constituted to select crews from among the many hundreds of applicants. TOKEN OF NATIONHOOD. The Eirish sailors are to wear a distinctive blue scarf and blue lanyard. They are to have a thick white line and thin one around their collars in contrast to the three thin lines of tile British Jack Tar. The hat badge is the same as in the Irish Army (F. F. standing for Faith and Fatherland) and it surmounts the regulation naval anchor sign .which is common to most navies. Irishmen feel that Eire’s navy may be smaller than most, but that its very existence _ will prove a valuable token of Eire’s individual nationhood. There is no record that the Irish, although islanders, ever before possessed any sort of national fleet, although it is possible that some of the currncae (enrraghs) described by Gildas in the sixth century as carrying Irish and Piet raiders to Britain were owned by the “High Kings” of that turbulent period.